Reflections on Leadership

Thoughts about leadership, caregiving, and the quiet costs of looking away.

Photo by Artem Kniaz on Unsplash.

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I have been thinking a lot about leadership lately.

For a long time, I believed leadership looked a certain way. It meant taking charge. Showing initiative. Delegating. Filling gaps. Making things that didn’t work, work.

Leadership, to me, was marked by competence and aptitude — efficiency, results. It was the person who stepped in when something was broken and got it back on track.

But a recent experience with my father forever changed my perception of leadership.

My dad has advanced Alzheimer’s. He requires assistance with all activities for daily living. After fracturing his hip, he was transferred to a rehabilitation facility. While he was there, he wasn’t being fed properly. What has been hardest to sit with isn’t only that it happened — it’s that people knew.

They saw what was happening. Yet they did nothing to change it.

No one raised the concern.

No one filled the gap in care.

No one spoke up.

Instead, they took the path of least resistance. They looked away. They continued with their routines — not out of cruelty, but out of self-preservation.

The cost of that silence was borne by someone who could not advocate for himself.

I don’t share this in judgment, but in grief.

Their silence could have cost my dad his life.

Someone should have notified senior staff.

Someone should have gone around those who chose to do nothing.

Someone should have fed him — even if it cost the facility money, even if it cost them their job.

When we finally realized what was happening, we discharged my dad against medical advice.

That experience permanently shifted my definition of leadership.

In the days that followed, I kept replaying the moments that could have gone differently — the small interruptions that might have altered the outcome. A question asked. A concern raised. A quiet refusal to look away. None of these would have required authority or permission. Only compassion—the willingness to see another person’s vulnerability and respond to it.

What unsettled me most was realizing how ordinary the failure was. There was no dramatic collapse, no single villain. Just a series of choices to remain silent, to preserve routine, to avoid risk. And in that quiet space, harm was allowed to continue.

It forced me to reconsider what leadership really asks of us.

Leadership isn’t just about delegation or efficiency. It isn’t about keeping things moving or avoiding disruption. It’s more than taking care of business.

It’s taking care of people.

Leadership is moral courage.

It is the willingness to stand up for what is right — even when it is uncomfortable.

Even when it carries real risk.

Even when the costs are high.

Especially when the costs are high.